Hotels, Cars and Trains

End stage Rome, Enter southern travel
We bid a fond farewell to the tiny awkward flat in Rome we called home and hit the road. Before we left we had a wonderful free business meal with Maria, who her and her family have become one of my many Italian relatives. We left to enter the world of long car rides and hotel rooms. After a 5 hour car ride down south we chilled at a hotel for the weekend were due to lack of refrigeration, where forced to chill our beers in the beday. It was around this time when I received the call that I needed to go all the way north back to San Remo for a meeting about my visa. For some reason the fact that I had a student visa was not enough they needed to see me in person, and Acle had just sent me far south for one promotion day, just so I could catch a solid 14 hour train ride back north, sweet(sarcasm) Yep the 14 hour dream journey started at 11pm at night where I left my worried team mates, got on the train with a dead cell phone, no ticket because I had never gotten the fax from the office, and not an English speaker in site. After a half an hour of charades with the ticket man on the train they sat me down in a cabin for a few hours till a different ticket person who spoke a little English came along to help.

The trip took three trains, they woke you up every few hours to check your tickets, and one time when I left my empty cabin to go to the bathroom around 3 in the morning, I returned to have the cabin I was in filled with a group of African girls who had spread out and taken all the seats and my bed, super sweet(much sarcasm). I arrived in San Remo looking like I had slept in a ditch and went to the police station to find out I they couldn’t even meet with me till the next day, and settled in for an evening in San Remo. After a few hours the next day waiting in the office for the police computers to come online(yep the polices computers were down, that must be safe) I took care of all the silly visa stuff and the office had been kind enough to book me a train ticket back to my group, this trip, an easy 18 hour journey on three different trains.

This beast of a journey at least had a night train to relieve some stress you would think, oh no no no. This was to be much funnier and less easy. The wonderful language barrier showed its head again here and I could not find my night train, after searching up and down the train for some clue to what the ticket in Italian said. Exhausted after a few hours train ride so far I looked for a sleep car with an empty bed and found one bed in a packed 6 person room left. I crawled in to it only to be woken twenty minutes later and kicked out at two in the morning by a ticket man to a spray of angry Italian because I apparently was in the wrong car. I stood in the hall weary and exhausted with no clue where I was going to sleep or what I was going to do till a different ticket man came bye, I showed him my ticket and he said” oh you are in the first class cabins” in english. I dumb founded was ushered to my own private cabin in the front and thankfully got seven hours sleep before I changed trains. I climbed into the bed of my private room and thanked any god I could that I was not found dead from travel exhaustion in the hall. I arrived to meet my group dazed as all hell, but quite content to no longer be within site of a train.